Listening to my Inner Writer

You would think after twenty years of writing, I would learn this simple lesson: Listen to your Intuition, your inner writer knows what it is doing. But apparently I haven’t, or maybe I should say, that it is harder than I thought to listen to the whispering voice that is telling me that I have to do something differently with the story.

Shortly after finishing The Warlord’s Daughter in January, that small niggling that something was off in the story intensified. As I worked through the scenes of The Scout’s Captive, that feeling grew stronger. By the first week of February, the niggling that something was off had become a shout to “Stop!”

So I had this burning desire to write the next part of the story and every time I sat down to do it I totally froze up. My inner writer was refuses to let me go any farther until I paid attention to it. Which is why I took the time to print out all the books, spent the last five days not writing so I could reassess the elements and structure of my stories, and making any structural changes. I got the idea for this from Twin Creatives.

I might have lost a few days of adding new words to the books by debating the merit of every scene I’d written or that I planned to write in all five books, but in the end it was worth the time I took away from writing.

The story structure really needed to be assessed because there were more than a few scenes that needed to be moved, added, deleted or merged. There was an entire section of scenes in books four and five that needed to be moved, merged, and deleted that made me glad that I hadn’t started writing them.

The unexpected changes that I made helped tighten and improve the story plot of each book, and reading through a hard copy of the stories also helped me understand the main plot of each book better. However, the changes to The Warlord’s Daughter shortened the books significantly, but I prefer a shorter story that moves the story along then a longer one brimming with filler scenes that don’t progress the plot. The Scout’s Captive, The Rebel Queen, and The Empty Throne gained quite a few scenes that enhance the plots of each story instead of taking away from them.

One change that I really didn’t expect was that I realization that the order of The Rebel Queen and The Empty Throne may have to be switched, but I’m going to wait until I’m a little further along before making that determination. I believe the only book that didn’t change much was The Lost Heir.

The small drawback won’t affect my goal to finish writing all five books in The Queen’s Rebellion Series this year. If anything it will help me finish them before their deadlines and get them ready to be published next year.

Funny thing is that after the weekend I realized that I’ve been really resistant on adding other POVs other than Mina and Cynel’s, mostly because I hate head hopping in books, only to realize that the other POV scenes are something I really should add. They aren’t going to ruin the story, they’ll help it along. LOL

I (Rebecca) am currently at this stage too, and it’s so true that it gets to the point where you just CAN’T write anymore until you’ve addressed those niggling feelings. I also completely agree that it is worth the time taken away from writing to take a step back and reassess – it is likely to save time at a later stage anyway! As you’ve said, it is much better to have a story where each scene progresses the plot than a bunch of unnecessary filler stuff.

Thank you for the comment! I just have to say that I love your guys blog posts. There is a lot of great writing advice on your website and even though it was an older post at the time that I ran across “Using the Notecards to Evaluate Novel Structure” was especially helpful in the circumstances I found myself in. Plus I love notecards. 😀

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